Nation & world briefs: Candidates, even Trump, shift to delegate hunt

The Associated Press

Published 4:25 pm, Sunday, April 10, 2016

WASHINGTON— The Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are coming to terms with the cold mathematical reality of chasing delegates ahead of their nominating conventions, with front-runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump driving for challenge-proof majorities against rivals who won’t go away.

For Trump, who remains well short of the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the GOP nod, that means his campaign focuses on developing a delegate-centered strategy akin to the one that rival Ted Cruz has pursued for months.

Even so, the billionaire developer later in the day complained that the system is “corrupt” and “crooked” and said it’s unfair that the person who wins the most votes may not be the nominee.

“What they’re trying to do is subvert the movement with crooked shenanigans,” Trump told a crowd of thousands gathered in a packed airport hangar in Rochester, New York. “We’re supposed to be a democracy,” he added, drawing parallels with Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders.

Keiko Fujimori likely to win 1st round of Peru election

LIMA, Peru — The daughter of jailed former President Alberto Fujimori won the first round of Peru’s presidential election Sunday, though she didn’t get enough votes to avoid a June runoff and the race to be her opponent was tight, according to two quick counts of ballots by local pollsters.

Center-right candidate Keiko Fujimori was likely to end up with about 39 percent of the votes, said a quick count carried out by local pollster Ipsos representing 85 percent of polling stations nationwide. Former World Bank economist Pedro Kuczynski was expected to get 22 percent, compared to 18 percent for leftist congresswoman Veronika Mendoza.

A quick count by local pollster Gfk had similar results.

Official results weren’t expected until sometime Sunday night. And the pollsters said the second-place spot for the runoff might not be settled for days as votes from abroad were tallied. More than 880,000 Peruvians living abroad were registered to vote, making up 3.8 percent of the electorate.

Also being decided were all 130 seats in Peru’s congress.

Voters stand by Trump as champion of political incorrectness

Donald Trump’s inflammatory statements about Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees and women who get abortions may eventually be his campaign’s undoing, some analysts say. But don’t tell that to the many supporters such as Titus Kottke, attracted to the Republican front-runner specifically because he shoots from the lip.

“No more political correctness,” said Kottke, 22, a cattle trucker and construction worker from Athens, Wisconsin, who waited hours last weekend to see the candidate in a line stretching the length of a shopping mall.

Trump is “not scared to offend people,” Kottke said. He agrees with some of the views Trump expresses but likes the fact that the candidate shows the confidence to reject the dogma of political correctness. That “takes away your freedom of speech, pretty much. You can’t say anything.”

For years, conservatives have decried political correctness as a scourge of orthodox beliefs and language, imposed by liberals, that keeps people from voicing uncomfortable truths.

Now, some Trump supporters — many white, working-class voters frustrated with the country’s shifting economics and demographics — applaud him for not being afraid to make noise about the things that anger them but that they feel discouraged from saying out loud.

Syrian cease-fire strained by new clashes ahead of talks

BEIRUT — Government forces and rebels clashed Sunday across northern and western Syria, imperiling a monthlong cease-fire ahead of peace talks in Geneva, while airstrikes pounded the Islamic State group’s de facto capital of Raqqa, killing dozens.

Al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, is playing a leading role on the side of the insurgents, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group with a network of informers inside Syria.

The fighting follows weeks of sporadic government airstrikes, culminating with a raid that killed 33 civilians outside the capital of Damascus on March 31 that tested the durability of a U.S.- and Russia-brokered “cessation of hostilities” that took effect in late February.The Nusra Front and the Islamic State group are excluded from the cease-fire, which had brought relative calm to much of Syria for the first time in the 5-year-old civil war between forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and those trying to topple him.Observatory head Rami Abdurrahman said fighting was intensifying around the northern city of Aleppo and “definitely” threatens the cease-fire.Hundreds hurt as migrants confront Macedonian border police IDOMENI, Greece — Migrants waged running battles with Macedonian police Sunday after they were stopped from scaling the border fence with Greece near the border town of Idomeni, and aid agencies reported that hundreds of stranded travelers were injured.Macedonian police used tear gas, stun grenades, plastic bullets and a water cannon to repel the migrants, many of whom responded by throwing rocks over the fence at police. Greek police observed from their side of the frontier but did not intervene.More than 50,000 refugees and migrants have been stranded in Greece after Balkan countries closed their borders to the massive flow of refugees pouring into Europe. Around 11,000 remain camped out at the border with Macedonia, ignoring instructions from the government to move to organized shelters as they hold out hope to reach Western Europe.Clashes continued in the afternoon as migrant groups twice tried to overwhelm Macedonian border security. The increasing use of tear gas reached families in their nearby tents in Idomeni’s makeshift camp. Many camp dwellers, chiefly women and children, fled into farm fields to escape the painful gas.Observers held out hope that evening rainfall, which began about seven hours into the clashes, would dampen hostilities.